laser sight that I mustn’t use too often because we can’t change the power pack. Go ahead, hippo, make my day. Did I fire five shots, or did I fire six?
Some of the birds I’ve seen hunting in the shallow water seem to be carrying strange parasites like autonomous, mutated body organs.
About ten minutes ago, Rose, through Bushbaby, asked if she could braid my hair for me. I’ve been admiring hers since I met her at the pick-up point: plaited and wrapped with threads, string and wax, strung with tiny Indian bells and amber beads. Bushbaby says they’ve both been admiring my hair for as long. They can’t get over the colour. Rose unpacks her threads and wires and beads from her pack, sits behind me and sets to work. She lifts my hair. I grasp her hand, turn to face her.
‘Posse?’ I ask, holding up the maimed hand.
She nods her head. ‘Mombi.’
You see the pink Cadillacs and the zoot suits and the girls cute and pouting in nylon and leather. You never see the deputies and the law they enforce. For the first infringement, the left little finger. For the second, the right little finger. To keyboard users, this maiming is symbolic as well as functional.
They lose their patience when it comes to the third offence.
I kiss the back of Rose’s hand, never taking my eyes off her.
She’s doing a fabulous job on my hair. The beads swing and click at every move of my head. It’s more than just a pass-time or sign of personal affection. It’s a ritual. A marking. I’m one of the tribe now.
Moran is shouting back from the lead boat. We’ll camp tonight at the remains of Ol Tukai Lodge where this snow-watered swampland runs out of Lake Amboseli and we enter the Loolturesh Discontinuity. I am back in her footsteps again: Moon, Niamh O’Hanlon, my Arne Saknussen.
(Later)
Moran says he thinks there is somebody else out there.
Day Three
M’zee agrees. We are not alone in here. It’s not the Wa-chagga: their country is on the far side of the discontinuity. UNECTA explorers are a possibility. The Black Simbas have no quarrel with them, but UNECTA reports to the military, with whom all the Tacticals are unilaterally at war, so contact is best avoided. The only thing the Tacticals hate more than the military are their cartel rivals. A lot of wealth and power crosses terminum into the camps, some are realizing later than others, so they send combat teams to follow the safari squads to their source, kill everything that breathes and claim what they find for their cartel. They’re scary. The Wa-chagga nation have a treaty with the Black Simba Cartel, they will protect us from claim jumpers. But they are a day away across Lake Amboseli in open canvas boats and the first and last you will know about claim jumpers is the itch of a laser sight on your forehead and nothing ever again. Fabulous.
There are things scarier than claim jumpers. Obi-men. Forest wanderers. People who have found their way into the Chaga, become trapped by it, and changed.
No one answers.
Jake is with us in the women’s boat today. He wants footage of the lake crossing and feels he should direct the shots so we don’t waste space on our limited supply of discs. He’s never been this deep. Lake Amboseli had once been seasonal, fed by subterranean springs drawing snow melt from the mountain, evaporating in the heat of the dry season. Now it is permanent, sealed under the transparent roof of the Loolturesh Discontinuity. The roof is made of balloons fifty metres in diameter, stuck together somehow, moored about three hundred metres up on lines and gnarled hold-fasts gripping the floor of the lake. Thousands, probably millions, of balloons, as clear as glass. Shot: a receding perspective of the still waters of Lake Amboseli with infinite regress of vertical lines. Steering through the hold-fasts makes slow passage, especially when you do not know what you will find around the next knot of cables and roots.
There are things moving in the balloon canopy; things that cling to the curved undersurfaces, feeding off the occasional veils of translucent blue moss; and other things that float like animate zeppelins, steering themselves between the cables by languid ripplings of gossamer tail membranes. Jake has to tell me to stop shooting. But they’re there, they’re real. I have them.
Monkeys have colonized this vertical landscape. They run up and down the cables, fingering morsels out of the crevices between the plaited strands, cramming their faces as they watch us pass beneath. Many of them carry elegantly obscene deformities: antlers of green coral, mottlings of green and purple mould, extra sets of red arms and hands.
Changed.
She saw this, I remember. She noted this. But she draws no conclusions about whether these are pre-natal deformities or the Chaga somehow manipulating the flesh of the grown animal. No conclusions that I have read. Maybe they, like so much, are in the vanished pages.
This landscape breeds paranoia.
Jake. I am learning not to treat him as a folio of cliches. He is more alive here, with death so strong inside him, than I have ever seen him before. He manages to maintain his sartorial crispness – God knows how, I look like Jana of the Jungle after a heavy night. Even his sweat rings are precisely circular. His spirit is strong, but I fear that his body is beginning to betray him. He tires easily. And his sleep is troubled – several times a night he will cry out loud enough to wake the camp. Jake tells me he hears voices in his sleep. Mutterings in his hind brain, like someone talking in another room, loud enough for the voice to be heard but not the words it is speaking.
She wrote about spirit voices, calling her deeper into the heartlands. She imagined them to be lost, crazy Langrishe’s. Did she ever find him? Is he still out there in all those thousands of square miles of the alien?
(Later)
Camp three. Well into the weird now. I should do that doo-de-doo-doo, doo-de-doo-doo from the
Up here.
Ha ha.
We’re on the far side of the Discontinuity, in the land of the Crystal Monoliths. The Land of the Wa-chagga. We hope it was their turds Dog found close by the landing where we stashed the boats. Fresh turds. About an hour or two old. Nothing lasts too long here. If they aren’t Wa-chagga, they mean that the ones who were following us are no longer following us. They’re in front of us.
Beyond the Discontinuity the terrain changes as abruptly as those old Tarzan movies where Johnny Weissmuller runs from Sahara sand straight into tropical jungle. The Crystal Monolith zone isn’t just one Chaga. It’s a whole department store of them, stacked on top of each other. Each level is a separate biosphere, with its own unique flora and fauna. The way forward is up.
Dog’s unfailing nose leads us right to the climb, a hundred or so steel pitons hammered into the main column of what looks like a Fassbinderesque Fitzcarraldo-fantasy of an oil refinery lost in Amazonia. Sugardaddy unpacks a couple of hundred yards of old-fashioned hemp mountaineering rope and body harness and goes up the pitch. It’s beautiful. Rock dancing. He hauls up Dog, who swings slowly in his harness, like a canine Foucault pendulum.
The only thing holding me to these steel pitons is the determination that I am not going to be hauled up like a side of meat. Don’t look down, they say. I have no problem with that. Rose comes up after me with almost as much style as Sugardaddy, Uzi dangling under her ass.
There’s an old American slave expression I can’t get out of my head: the Way in the Air. We are pilgrims on that Way, toward holy Zion;
